A man holds a doll depicting Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy with a placard reading “Mariano had a problem with the scissors” during a demonstration against the government’s welfare cuts, to reject the new Labour Reform and to demand other economic and social policy response to the crisis on Wednesday. PHOTO BY AFP

With the Eurozone debt crisis showing no sign of resolution and Spain lately under pressure, Rajoy felt he had to put Spain’s circumstances into perspective.
In a text message to the Spanish Finance Minister Luis De Guindos, leading Spain’s negotiations with its European creditors, Rajoy sought to allay worries about Spain’s ability to repay its 100 billion euro bailout loan. Rajoy wrote among other things that ““España no es Uganda”, or “Spain is not Uganda”.

Just as Winston Churchill’s statement that Uganda “is the Pearl of Africa” has for 80 years come to define Ugandans even to themselves, another European Prime Minister’s observation about Uganda, this time more dismissively “Uganda is not Spain” is going to hang over Uganda’s head for the next 50 years.
Responding to this view of Uganda through what the American Pop superstar termed in a 1989 song Spanish Eyes, the editor of the London-based newsletter Africa Confidential, Patrick Smith commented in the now familiar political correctness of Whites: “[The text message] connotes old-fashioned European thinking from almost the 19th Century, that there are all these different worlds within the world and Africa is out there, completely cut off and bumbling along. If you go to Africa today, there’s a lot of people, many of them European, touting for business, trying to get in on the economic growth.”
The BBC weighed in on this debate with a headline on its website “Spain is not Uganda. Discuss”. As it was with Patrick Smith, the BBC condescendingly attempted to show the “positive side” to Ugandan, naming as examples of famous living Ugandans a singer-guitarist called Michael Kiwanuka, a scientist at the U.S. space agency NASA Kwatsi Alibaruho, and, most interestingly to most Ugandans today, President Yoweri Museveni.
As expected, there was a defiant debate on “social media” by Ugandans angry (or pretending fashionably to be angry) at this put-down by the Spanish Prime Minister --- that, of course, until they are offered a visa to go and study or work in Spain.
There are things about Africa that are much better than what there is in Europe. There is still a certain basic sense of community, family and warmth amongst the people. Some of the age-old traditions that Europeans now discard as bigoted or out-of-date are still upheld by the majority of Ugandans and no amount of exposure to Western media and celebrity culture is about to change that.Many Africans have visited, studied or lived in Europe and North America and consistent among their observations is the aloofness and somewhat cold personalities of the Whites. There is simply no reason that Whites don’t talk to each other on trains, buses or planes. Part of the result of this emotional distance is the high number of medical depression, suicides and other emotional problems common to the West.
A forthcoming BBC World Service programme will report on the fact that in Japan, one of the world’s wealthiest and most technologically advanced countries, the birth rate has fallen so low and the Japanese have become so fond of dogs that, bizzarely, there are now more dogs in Japan than children under the age of 15.
Proud of Africa
That degree of absurdity makes one grateful to be an African. However, that is where it must stop. The social perversion among Europeans should not be reason for us to distort the bare facts of our different material and political circumstances.
In his Tuesday June 19, 2012 Daily Monitor column, Daniel Kalinaki noted that “At Independence in 1962, Uganda had more impressive development figures, or at least relatively similar development figures with countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Ghana, South Korea, etc.”
I have raised questions about even this assertion, because it seems to assume that Uganda was a flourishing country in the 1950s but upon attainment of self-rule it started a precipitous decline. True in many ways; but exactly which Uganda was this at 1962? Was it the Uganda planned and run by Okello, Mukasa, Isabirye, Mugisha, Masaba, Othieno, Mwesige, or was it a Uganda run by Smith, McDonald, Johnson, Davies, Mitchell, Cook, which in essence made it Britain in Africa?
Several years ago, about 2004, one of President Museveni’s daughters or daughter-in-law was sent to Spain to have her baby delivered. Museveni knows more than most people that Spain is not Uganda.
Just for the record, Spain is the fourth-largest economy in the Eurozone, the fifth-largest in Europe and the 12th largest in the world. If all the economies of Africa’s 54 countries were to be put together (including South Africa’s), Spain’s economy would still be larger than all of them combined.
Tourism destination Spain is the world’s fourth leading tourism destination, behind only France in top position followed by the United States and China. Among the world’s nations, Spain ranks as the sixth leading publisher of new book titles per year (China currently ranks as the number one with the United States in second position).
Spain currently has 87 newspapers in daily or weekly publication.
Spain hosted the football World Cup in 1982 and the Summer Olympic Games in 1992. It has one of the world’s most competitive and best-known national football leagues and at present, are the World Champions.
One of the problems we face today and since the mid 1990s has been the tendency by White Western, guilt-ridden, politically-correct, liberal politicians, academicians and journalists to overcompensate for past slavery, colonialism and apartheid by going to the opposite extreme and declaring that the Emperor called Africa has clothes and fine clothes at that. Not only does this Emperor called Africa have no clothes on (literally in most cases), but often he has no shoes on his feet and his feet commonly are infected with jiggers.